The present disclosure relates to an operation device, an image forming apparatus, an operation method, and a computer-readable non-transitory storage medium by which even when a translated character set of a translation language is missing, an existing translated character set can be substituted for the missing translated character set.
There are known many conventional technologies concerning translation performed by an operation portion of an image forming apparatus such as a copier, a multifunction peripheral, a printer or the like. For example, as a typical technology, there is known a translated publication providing system including a terminal device and a server. The terminal device includes: an input portion for inputting image data in which an identifier (ID) is embedded in a digital watermarking format, an input portion for inputting the specification of a translation language; and a transmission portion for transmitting the input image data and translation language specification to a server. The server includes a receiving portion, an extracting portion, a database, a retrieving portion, a synthesizing portion, and an output portion. The receiving portion receives the image data from the terminal device. The extracting portion extracts the ID in the digital watermarking format and the translation language specification from the received image data. The data base stores a plurality of groups of respective image-related data having at least page data and translated sentence data based on respective translation languages as elements and IDs corresponding to respective image-related data. The retrieving portion retrieves each image-related data corresponding to the extracted ID from the database. The synthesizing portion synthesizes the retrieved page data and the translated sentence data of the specified translation language to generate a translation page. The output portion outputs the translation page. In this structure, an identifier is embedded in image data in a digital watermarking format. This prevents impairing of the design of the printed document. Also, with this structure, the server extracts the ID in the digital watermarking format from the image data. This spares the terminal device of the need to be loaded with software for the extraction. Thus, this structure does not reduce the capacity of the storage of the terminal device. Nor does it require the terminal device to have an excessive CPU performance. Furthermore, since the version upgrade of the software is completed only with the version upgrade of the software installed in the server, the hand of the user is not bothered.
Meanwhile, to support a plurality of regions in the world, in the above-mentioned typical image forming apparatus, a plurality of translation languages are set such that the display language can be switched from a standard display language to any of the translation languages. For example, English may be set as the display language and German, French, Spanish, Italian, Netherlandish, Russian, languages in Asia (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.) and other languages may be set as the translation languages in the image forming apparatus.
Here, the translation languages include: a standard translation language that is determined in advance; and optional translation languages that can be selected arbitrarily by the user. In general, the optional translation languages are set by the manufacturer or the administrator installing the language data of predetermined translation languages in correspondence with regions in which the image forming apparatus is sold or installed.
The language data (also referred to as firmware) of the optional translation languages is managed differently from the language data of the standard translation language. For example, when the display language of the operation portion in the image forming apparatus is renewed, the language data of the standard translation language is automatically updated in correspondence with functions that have been added newly by the renewal. On the other hand, the language data of the optional translation languages is not automatically updated, and the administrator or the like needs to install new language data in correspondence with the additional functions. This is because, in general, the language data of the standard translation language is not compatible with the language data of the optional translation languages, and thus, even when the language data of the standard translation language is updated, the language data of the optional translation languages is not updated appropriately.